I was recently talking to Hans Boehm about floating point rounding modes. They are a mess, aren't they? It's a piece of global application state that very subtly changes the meaning of every floating-point operation in the whole program. It causes bugs in compilers, confusion for programmers, and all sorts of pain for library developers. So what would be better? Can we get rid of rounding modes? Well, for one, we could just get rid of rounding modes entirely. I don't mean remove them from the...
